Chapter 1

A Dubious Prodigy

According to the colourful yarn spun for the benefit of his followers, L.
Ron Hubbard was descended on his mother's side from a French nobleman, one
Count de Loupe, who took part in the Norman invasion of England in 1066; on
his father's side, the Hubbards were English settlers who had arrived in
America in the nineteenth century. It was altogether a distinguished naval
family: both his maternal great-grandfather, 'Captain' I. C. DeWolfe, and his
grandfather, 'Captain' Lafayette Waterbury, 'helped make American naval
history',[1] while his father was 'Commander' Harry
Ross Hubbard, US Navy.

As his father was away at sea for lengthy periods, the story goes, little
Ron grew up on his wealthy grandfather's enormous cattle ranch in Montana,
said to cover a quarter of the state [approximately 35,000 square miles!]. His
picturesque friends were frontiersmen, cowboys and an Indian medicine man. 'L.
Ron Hubbard found the life of a young rancher very enjoyable. Long days were
spent riding, breaking broncos, hunting coyote and taking his first steps as
an explorer. For it was in Montana that he had his first encounter with
another culture the Blackfoot [Pikuni] Indians. He became a blood brother of
the Pikuni and was later to write about them in his first published novel,
Buckskin Brigades. When he was ten years old, in 1921, he rejoined his
family. His father, alarmed at his apparent lack of formal learning,
immediately put him under intense instruction to make up for the time he had
"lost" in the wilds of Montana. So it was that by the time he was twelve years
old, L. Ron Hubbard had already read a goodly number of the world's greatest
classics - and his interest in religion and philosophy was
born.'[2]

* * * * *

Virtually none of this is true. The real story of L. Ron Hubbard's early
life is considerably more prosaic and begins not on a cattle ranch but in a
succession of rented apartments necessarily modest since his father was a
struggling white-collar clerk drifting from job to job. His grandfather was
neither a distinguished sea captain nor a wealthy

rancher but a small-time veterinarian who supplemented his income renting
out horses and buggies from a livery barn. It is true, however, that his name
was Lafayette O. Waterbury.

As far as anyone knew, the Waterburys came from the Catskills, the
dark-forested mountain range in New York State celebrated in the early
nineteenth century as the setting for Washington Irving's popular short story
about Rip Van Winkle - a character only marginally more fantastic than the
Waterburys' most famous scion.

Abram Waterbury, L. Ron Hubbard's great-grandfather, playing the fiddle
carved with a negro's head that became part of the family legend.

Shortly before the turmoil of the Civil War divided the nation, Abram
Waterbury and his young wife, Margaret, left the Catskills to join the
thousands of hopeful settlers trekking west in covered wagons to seek a better
future. By 1863 he had set up in business as a veterinarian in Grand Rapids,
Michigan and on 25 July 1864, Margaret gave birth to a son whom they named
Lafayette, perhaps after the town in Indiana at which they had stopped on
their journey before turning north to Grand Rapids.

Lafayette, undoubtedly thankful to be known to his friends as Lafe, learned
the veterinary trade from his father and married before he was twenty. His
bride was twenty-one-year-old Ida Corinne DeWolfe, from Hampshire, Illinois.
Diminutive in stature, Ida was a gentle, intelligent, strong-willed young
woman whose mother had died in childbirth, with her eighth child, when Ida was
sixteen. John DeWolf, her father, was a wealthy banker who clung to a fanciful
family legend about the origins of the DeWolfes in Europe. Details and dates
were vague, but the essence of the story was that a courtier accompanying a
prince on a hunting expedition in France had somehow saved his master from an
attack by a wolf; in gratitude the prince had ennobled the faithful courtier,
bestowing upon him the title of Count de Loupe, a name that was eventually
anglicized to DeWolfe. [No records exist to support this story, either in
Britain or France; Vice-Admiral Harry De Wolf, twelfth-generation descendant
of Balthazar De Wolf, the first De Wolf in America, says he has never heard of
Count de Loupe.[3]]

DeWolfe offered the young couple the use of a farm he owned in Nebraska on
condition that Lafe would maintain and improve the property. It was at
Burnett, a settlement on the Elkhorn river, one hundred miles west of Omaha,
which had recently been opened up by the arrival of the Sioux City and Pacific
Railroad.

Burnett was an unremarkable cluster of log cabins, dug-outs and ramshackle
pine huts huddled in a lazy curve of the river and surrounded by gently
rolling prairie. It might never have appeared on any map had not the
homesteaders persuaded the railroad to make a halt nearby. The first train
arrived in 1879 and thereafter the town developed around the railroad depot
rather than the river; within a

few years a general store, saloon and livery stable were in business. The
Davis House Hotel, opened in 1884, was considered the finest on the whole
Fremont, Elkhorn and Missouri Valley Railroad.

By the time Lafe and Ida Waterbury arrived in Burnett, soon after the
opening of the hotel, Ida was heavy with child; a daughter, Ledora May, was
born in 1885. During the next twenty years Ida would produce seven more
children and selflessly devote herself to the upbringing of a happy, close and
high-spirited family.

Ron's grandfather was supposed to have owned a quarter of the state of
Montana. Here he is seen as he really was, a struggling veterinarian, pictured
with his wife and their first child (Ron's mother) at Tilden, Nebraska, around
the late 1880s.

For a couple of years Lafe worked his father-in-law's farm, but a bitter
family row developed when DeWolfe indicated his intention to exclude his other
children and leave the property solely to Ida and Lafe. Rather than be the
cause of strife in the family, Lafe moved out, opened a livery stable in town
on Second Street and established himself as a veterinarian. His business was a
success because he was well-liked and respected in the area, particularly
after playing a starring role in a local domestic drama which briefly held the
town gossips in thrall. Ida's sister, who had also moved to Burnett, woke up
one morning to discover that her husband had left her and taken their infant
son with him to New York. Lafe immediately packed his bags, set off for New
York by train, tracked down the erring husband and returned to Burnett in
triumph, his nephew in his arms.

When Ida gave birth to another daughter in 1886, it was a typically
warm-hearted gesture that prompted them to name the baby Toilie. A young man
who used to hang around the livery stable had been engaged to a girl called
Toilie before he became mentally deranged; whenever he felt 'strange' he would
always, for some reason, seek out Lafe and find reassurance from his
company. When he learned that Ida and Lafe had had another daughter, he shyly
asked if they would call her Toilie, after the sweetheart he knew he would
never be able to marry. Years later the irreverent Toilie would say 'I'm nuts
because I was named by a crazy man' and shriek with laughter.

Toilie was still a baby when hard times hit Burnett. In January 1887 a
catastrophic blizzard swept across the plains west of the Mississippi, killing
thousands of head of cattle; most of the local ranchers were mined
overnight. The farmers fared no better, for that terrible winter was followed
by a succession of blistering summers accompanied by plagues of grasshoppers
which devastated the already sparse crops. But at a point when many of the
despairing townsfolk were talking about giving up the struggle against the
unforgiving elements, the climate suddenly improved and the detested
grasshoppers disappeared; unlike many small towns in the Nebraska prairie,
Burnett survived the crisis.

By 1899 the local newspaper, the Burnett Citizen, was able to
report, as evidence of increasing prosperity, that Lafe Waterbury was

among those who had built new dwelling houses in the town that year. It was
a fine, two-storey, wood-frame house on Elm Street, sheltered at the front by
two huge elm trees. At the rear, beyond a stand of willows, it overlooked
prairie stretching away into hazy infinity; deer and antelope often ventured
within sight of the back yard and at night the howls of coyotes made the
children shiver in their beds.

The Waterbury family photographed in their home town of Helena, Montana.
Ledora May Waterbury, Ron's mother (left), with an unidentified relative,
her sisters Toilie and Midgie and brother Ray.

The Waterburys certainly needed the space offered by their new home, for by
now May and Toilie had been joined by Ida Irene (called Midgie by the family
because she was so small), a brother Ray, and two more sisters, Louise and
Hope. Another two girls, Margaret and June, would follow in 1903 and 1905.
Lafe and Ida doted on their children, thoroughly enjoyed their company and
liked nothing more than when the house was full of noise and laughter. Ida was
determined that her children would have a happier upbringing than her own -
she never forgot being constantly beaten at school for writing with her left
hand - and as a consequence the Waterburys were unusually relaxed parents for
their time, encouraging their offspring to attend church on Sundays, for
example, but caring little which church they attended. Surprisingly, there was
considerable choice. For a small town with a population of less than a
thousand people, Burnett was an excessively God-fearing community and
supported four thriving churches - Baptist, Lutheran, Methodist and Catholic.

Lafe and Ida always claimed they were too busy to go to church themselves,
although Lafe openly declared, to his children, his ambivalence towards
religion: 'Some of the finest men I have ever known were preachers,' he liked
to say, 'and some of the biggest hypocrites I have ever known were preachers.'
He was a large, bluff man with an irrepressible sense of humour, a talent for
mimicry and a hint of the showman about him: he often used to announce his
intention to put all his children on the stage. In the evenings, when he had
had a drink or two, he would sit on the porch and play his fiddle, which had a
negro's head carved at the end of the shaft.

Tutored by Lafe, who was considered to be one of the best horsemen in
Madison County, all the children learned to ride almost as soon as they could
walk and each of them was allocated a pony from the Waterbury livery
stable. Also quartered with the horses was the family cow, Star, who
obligingly provided them every day with as much milk as they could drink.

In 1902, because of confusion with a similarly-named town nearby, the good
folk of Burnett decided to change the name of their town to Tilden, thereby
commemorating an unsuccessful presidential candidate, Samuel J. Tilden, who
had contested the 1876 election won by Rutherford B. Hayes. May was the first
of the Waterbury children to graduate, in 1904, from Tilden High School. Tall,
outspoken and

independent, she was an unashamed feminist - she was outraged when she read
in the newspaper that a policeman in New York had arrested a woman for smoking
in the street and thrilled to learn that deaf and blind Helen Keller had
graduated from Radcliffe College the same year she graduated from Tilden. It
surprised no one in the family when May announced that she wanted a career,
declaring her belief that there must be more to life than caring for a husband
and bearing children. Accordingly, and with the blessing of her parents, she
set off for Omaha to train as a teacher. But by the time she had qualified as
a high school and institute teacher, certificate of Nebraska, she was writing
letters home about a young sailor she had met called 'Hub'.

Ledora May Hubbard, Ron's long-suffering mother, and her husband Harry
Ross Hubbard, Ron's father, in the dress uniform of a US Navy officer. Ron
remembered his mother sometimes with affection, sometimes with deep dislike;
his father found that promotion eluded him and debtors pursued him.

Harry Ross Hubbard was not a descendent of a long
line of Hubbards but an orphan. Born Henry August Wilson on 31 August 1886 at
Fayette, Iowa, his mother had died when he was a baby and he had been adopted
by a Mr and Mrs James Hubbard, farmers in Frederiksburg, Iowa, who changed his
name to Harry Ross Hubbard.

At school, Harry was not a high flier. He briefly attended a business
college at Norma Springs, Iowa, but dropped out when he realized he had little
chance of a degree. On 1 September 1904, the day after his eighteenth
birthday, he joined the United States Navy as an enlisted man. While serving
as a yeoman on the USS Pennsylvania, he began writing 'romantic tales'
of Navy life for newspapers back home, earning useful extra income. He was
posted to the US Navy recruiting office in Omaha in 1906 when he met May
Waterbury and it was not long before her plans for an independent career were
more or less forgotten. They married on 25 April 1909, and by the summer of
1910 May was pregnant; her husband, now discharged from the Navy, had found
work as a commercial teller in the advertising department of the Omaha
World Herald newspaper.

The Waterburys, meanwhile, had left Tilden and moved to Durant in
south-east Oklahoma, close to the border with Texas. Lafe had seen the first
Model T. Ford trundle cautiously through the main street of Tilden and
realized that his livery stable faced an uncertain future; when a close friend
in Durant suggested to him that the warmer climate in the south would be
better for all the family, he talked it over with Ida and they decided to go,
making the eight hundred-mile trip by railroad. Ray, then sixteen, travelled
with Star and the horses and fed and watered the animals during the journey.

Only Toilie stayed behind in Tilden. She was twenty-three and working as a
nurse and secretary for Dr Stuart Campbell, who had opened a small hospital in
a wood-frame house on Oak Street, just a block away from the Waterbury family
home. Toilie was reluctant to give up her job and her parents readily accepted
her decision not to go with them to Oklahoma.

Campbell, who had set up a practice in Tilden in 1900, had delivered Ida
Waterbury's two youngest children, but it was the fact that Toilie was working
for him that persuaded May to return to Tilden to give birth to her first
child. With only a little more than a year between them, May and Toilie had
always been close, walking to and from school arm in arm, sharing a bedroom
and incessantly giggling together over childhood secrets.

Toilie was waiting at the railroad depot in Tilden at the end of February
1911 when May, helped by a solicitous Hub, heaved herself down from the
train. Although Tilden was still no more than four dirt streets running north
to south, intersected by four more running east-west, May noticed plenty of
changes in the short time she had been away - four grain elevators had been
built, three saloons and two pool halls had opened, Mrs Mayes was competing
with the Botsford sisters in the millinery trade and there was even a new
'opera house' - true, it had yet to stage its first opera, but the road shows
were always popular, particularly since Alexander's Ragtime Band had set the
nation's feet tapping.

The hospital in Tilden, Nebraska, where L. Ron Hubbard was born in
1911. His aunt Toilie, who worked in the hospital, is second from the
right.

May did not have long to wait for the 'blessed event'. She went into labour
during the afternoon of Friday 10 March, and Toilie arranged for her to be
admitted immediately to Dr Campbell's hospital. At one minute past two o'clock
the following morning, she was delivered of a son. She and Hub had already
decided that if it was a boy, he would be named Lafayette Ronald Hubbard.

Ida and Lafe Waterbury did not see their first grandchild until Christmas
1911, when Hub, May and the baby arrived to spend the holiday with them in
Durant. Lafe, who had been out treating a neighbour's horse, burst into the
house, threw his hat on the floor and leaned over the crib to shake his
grandson's hand. Baby Ron smiled obligingly and Lafe whooped with pleasure,
trumpeting at his wife: 'Look, the little son of a bitch knows me already.'

The biggest surprise for the family was that Ron had a startling thatch of
fluffy orange hair. Hub was dark-haired and the Waterburys had no more than a
hint of auburn in their colouring - nothing like the impish little carrot-top
who gurgled happily as he was passed from one lap to another. Seven-year-old
Margaret, known in the family as Marnie, spoke for everyone when she
proclaimed her new nephew to be 'cute as a bug's ear'.

During that Christmas May told her parents that Hub had got a new job on a
newspaper in Kalispell, Montana, and that they would be moving there from
Omaha in the New Year. She was hopeful that it would prove to be a step up for
them.

letters from Kalispell. Perhaps missing the family, she often hinted that
they might consider joining her and Hub in Montana. Kalispell was a fine,
modern city, she wrote, with paved streets, electric lighting and many fine
houses. The surrounding Flathead Valley was famous for its fruit and at
blossom time the orchards of apples, peaches, pears, cherries and plums had to
be seen to be believed. One Kalispell farmer, Fred Whiteside, was so confident
about the quality of his fruit that he boasted he would give $1000 to anyone
finding a worm in one of his apples.

May's letters gave her parents much to think about, for they both
recognized that the move to Oklahoma had not been a success. When they first
arrived in Durant, Lafe bought a livery barn on the outskirts of town and for
several months the whole family lived in the hayloft above the animals. They
built a cookhouse on the property so they had somewhere to eat their meals and
then started on a house.

None of the children minded the privations in the least - indeed, they
rather enjoyed thinking of themselves as true pioneers - but Lafe found the
humid summers very debilitating. It made May's description of the blossom in
Montana all the more enticing.

Ida had been deeply disturbed by an incident that occurred soon after they
moved into their new house. A negro raped a white woman in the town and while
a posse was out looking for him, a rumour took hold that there was going to be
a negro uprising, causing something approaching panic, particularly in remote
outlying areas. At nightfall. Lafe and Ray took guns and went out on horses to
protect the approaches to their property, while the girls waited behind barred
windows, watching flares bounce through the night and listening to the rattle
of cartwheels as farmers shepherded their families into the safety of the
town.

Although there was no uprising, both Ida and Lafe were concerned that there
might be a 'next time' and they did not want to feel that their safety
depended on their willingness to protect themselves with guns. In the fall of
1912, the Waterburys once again sold their house, packed up their belongings
and loaded their livestock on to railcars, this time bound for Kalispell,
Montana, 1500 miles to the north-west. Long delays at railheads, while waiting
with their freight cars to be picked up by north-bound trains, added days to
the journey and it was a week before they were hooked on to a Great Northern
Railway train labouring across the Rocky Mountains through the spectacular
passes that led to Kalispell.

The family reunion was the happiest of occasions and no one received more
attention than Ron, who had learned to take his first faltering steps. 'He was
very much the love child of the whole family,' said Marnie. 'He was adored by
everyone. I can still see that mop of red hair running around.'

Lafe found a small house in Orchard Park, a short walk from May and Hub's
home and only a block from the fairground, where he hoped to find work as a
veterinarian. With only two bedrooms, it was not nearly big enough for the
Waterbury tribe, but it had a barn that would accommodate all the horses and
still leave enough room for the long-suffering and widely-travelled
Star. Marnie and June, the two youngest children, were given one of the
bedrooms and Lafe built a big wood-frame tent in the yard for the other four:
inside, it was divided by a canvas screen - Ray slept on a bunk on one side
and Midgie, Louise and Hope were on the other. They had a stove to keep them
warm in the winter and were perfectly content. On summer evenings, Marnie and
June often heard their older sisters whispering and tittering in the tent and
sometimes they crept outside to join them and share the cherries they stole
almost every night from a neighbouring garden.

The Waterburys were happy in Kalispell: Ida and Lafe made no secret of the
pleasure they took in being able to see their grandson every day; Midgie met
her future husband, Bob, in the town; and Ray developed an impressive talent
for training horses. Under his careful tuition, the family ponies learned
tricks like counting by pawing the ground with a hoof and stealing
handkerchiefs from his pocket. The Waterbury 'show horses', ridden by the
Waterbury children, became a popular feature in the town parades and they
always competed in the races at the fairground.

Little Ron in a sailor hat. One day he would be the self-appointed
commodore of his own private navy.

Baby Ron remained the centre of the family's attention and the star of the
Waterbury photograph albums - Ron perched in an apple tree, Ron with Liberty
Bill, their English bull terrier, on the porch of the Kalispell house, Ron
trying to measure the back yard with a tape. Having clearly inherited
something of his grandfather's showmanship, Ron thoroughly enjoyed being in
the family spotlight.

Lafe was walking down Kalispell's main street one day with Marnie and Ron
when he bumped into Samuel Stewart, the governor of Montana, whom he had met
several times. 'Hey Sam,' he said, 'I'd like you to meet my little grandson,
Ron.' Stewart stooped, solemnly shook hands with the boy and stood chatting to
Lafe for a few minutes. After he had gone, Marnie, who had been neither
introduced nor acknowledged, turned furiously on her father and snapped, 'Why
didn't you introduce me? Don't I matter?' Lafe had the grace to apologize, but
Marnie could see by his broad grin that he was not in the least repentant.

As well as being favoured so shamelessly, Ron could always count on the
support of his many aunts in any family dispute. While he was learning to
talk, he would frequently drive his mother to distraction by running round the
house repeating the same, usually meaningless,

word over and over again. One afternoon at the Waterbury home, the word was
'eskobiddle'. May, at the end of her patience, finally shouted at him: 'If you
say that once more I'm going to go and wash your mouth out with soap.'

Ron looked coolly at her and smiled slowly. 'Eskobiddle!' he yelled at the
top of his voice. May immediately dragged him off and carried out her
threat. A few minutes later, Ida heard shrieks coming from the back yard and
discovered Midgie and Louise holding May down and washing her mouth with soap
to avenge their precious nephew.

Less than twelve months after the Waterburys arrived in Kalispell, May
broke the news that she and Hub were going to move on; Hub was having problems
with his job on the newspaper and had been offered a position as resident
manager of the Family Theater in the state capital, Helena. Ida and Lafe were
naturally upset but, as May said, Helena was only two hundred miles away and
it was also on the Great Northern Railroad, so they would be able to visit
each other frequently.

Nevertheless, it would not be the same, both doting grandparents gloomily
concluded, as having little Ronald in and out of the house almost every day.

Helena in 1913 was a pleasant city of Victorian brick and stone buildings
encircled by the Rocky Mountains, whose snow-dusted peaks stippled with pines
provided a scenic backdrop in every direction. The Capital Building, with its
massive copper dome and fluted doric columns, eloquently proclaimed its status
as the first city of Montana, as did the construction of the neo-Gothic St
Helena Cathedral, which was nearing completion on Warren Street. Electric
streetcars clanked along the brick-paved main street, once a twisting mountain
defile known as Last Chance Gulch in commemoration of the four prospectors who
had unexpectedly struck gold there in 1864 and subsequently rounded the city.

The Family Theater, at 21 Last Chance Gulch, occupied part of a handsome
red-brick terrace with an ornate stone coping, but it suffered somewhat from
its position, since it was in the heart of the city's red-light district and
could not have been more inappropriately named. Respectable families arriving
for the evening performance were required to avert their eyes from the
colourful ladies leaning out of the windows of the brothels on each side of
the theater, although it was not unknown for the occasional father to slip out
after the show had started and return before the final curtain, curiously
flushed.

Harry Hubbard's duties were to sell tickets during the day, collect them at
the door as patrons arrived, maintain order if necessary during the show and
lock up at the end of the evening. Although his title was

resident manager, he chose not to live at the theater and rented a rickety
little wooden house, not much better than a shack, on Henry Street, on the far
side of the railroad track. May hated it and soon found a small apartment on
the top floor of a house at 15 Rodney Street, closer to the theater and in a
better part of town.

Travelling road shows, sometimes comprising not much more than a singer,
pianist and a comedian, were the staple fare of the Family Theater. Ron was
often allowed to see the show and he would sit with his mother in the darkened
auditorium completely enthralled, no matter what the act. Years later he would
recall sitting in a box at the age of two wearing his father's hat and
applauding with such enthusiasm that the audience began cheering him rather
than the cast. He claimed the players took twelve curtain calls before they
realized what was happening.[4]

When the Waterburys paid a visit to Helena, Hub arranged for them to see
the show, made sure they had the best seats in the house and solemnly stood at
the door of the theater to collect their tickets as they filed in. Not long
after their return to Kalispell, May heard that her father had slipped on a
banana skin, fallen and broken his arm. She did not worry overmuch at first,
even when her mother wrote to say that the arm had not been set properly and
had had to be re-broken. Indeed, her worries were rather closer to home, for
Harry had been told by the owner of the Family Theater that unless the
audiences improved the theater might have to close.

The news from abroad was also giving cause for concern, despite Woodrow
Wilson's promise to keep America out of the war threatening to engulf
Europe. On Sunday 2 August 1914, headlines in the Helena Independent
announced that Germany had declared war on Russia and a despatch from London
confirmed: 'The die is cast . . . Europe is to be plunged into a
general war.' Closer to home, rival unions in the copper mines at Butte, only
sixty miles from Helena, were also at war. When the Miners' Union Hall was
dynamited, Governor Stewart declared martial law and sent in the National
Guard to keep order.

It was in this turbulent climate that the Family Theater finally closed its
doors, for the audiences did not pick up. Harry Hubbard was once again obliged
to look for work, but once again he was lucky - he was taken on as a
book-keeper for the Ives-Smith Coal Company, 'dealers in Original Bear Creek,
Roundup, Acme and Belt Coal', at 41 West Sixth Avenue. May, meanwhile, found a
cheaper apartment for the family on the first floor of a shingled wood-frame
house at 1109 Fifth Avenue.

Back in Kalispell, Lafe Waterbury was still having trouble with his arm. He
was not the kind of man to complain about bad luck, but no

_______________4. 1938 biography of L. Ron Hubbard by Arthur J. Burks, president of American Fiction Guild

one could have blamed him had he done so. His arm had to be set a third
time and just when it seemed it was beginning to heal he was thrown to the
ground by a horse he was examining. He was never to regain full strength in
that arm and although he was only fifty years old he knew he would not be able
to continue working as a vet, with all the pulling and pushing it
involved. Only the four youngest Waterbury girls were still at home, but Lafe
did not think he could afford to retire, even if that had been his
ambition. (His taxable assets were listed in the Kalispell City Directory at
$1550, which made him comfortably off, but not by any means rich.) No
prospects presented themselves immediately in Kalispell and Lafe and Ida began
considering another move. It somehow seemed natural, since they had followed
May to Kalispell, that they should now think about moving to Helena.

In the summer of 1915, Toilie, back home on a visit from the East, drove
her father to Helena in the family's Model T. Ford so that he could take a
look around. They stayed, of course, with May and Hub in their cramped
apartment on Fifth Avenue and Lafe was delighted to have the company of his
four-year-old grandson every time he went for a walk in town.

Hub presumably talked to his father-in-law about his job and the two men
almost certainly discussed the ever-increasing demand for coal and the
business opportunities available in Helena. As a bookkeeper, Hub knew the
figures, knew the profit Ives-Smith was making and knew the strength of the
market - it was information that undoubtedly influenced Lafe's decision to
move his family to Helena and set up a coal company of his own.

The Waterburys arrived in 1916 and bought a house at 736 Fifth Avenue, on
the corner of Raleigh Street, just two blocks from May and Hub's
apartment. Lafe considered himself very lucky to get the property, for it was
a sturdy two-storey house, built around the turn of the century, with light
and airy rooms, fine stained glass windows, a wide covered porch and an
unusual conical roof over a curved bay at one corner. It would quickly become
known by everyone in the family, with the greatest affection, as 'the old
brick'.

The Waterbury girls had wept bitterly on leaving Kalispell, largely because
their father had insisted that Bird, the Indian pony on which they had all
learned to ride, was too old to make the journey and would have to be left
behind. But their spirits soon lifted as they ran excitedly from room to room
in their new home and imagined themselves as fashionable young ladies of
substance.

Fifth Avenue was not yet a paved road, but it was lined with struggling
saplings which offered the promise of respectability and, more importantly, it
was straddled to the east by the Capital Building,

a monumental edifice of such grandeur that the girls were all deeply awed
by its proximity. To the west, Fifth Avenue appeared to plunge directly into
the forested green flanks of Mount Helena and just two blocks south of 'the
old brick', Raleigh Street ended in grassy hummocks which led up to the
mountains and promised limitless opportunities for play. Marnie, then thirteen
years old, could hardly imagine a better place to be.

Lafe rented a yard with a stable adjoining the Northern Pacific railroad
track where it crossed Montana Avenue and put up a sign announcing that the
Capital City Coal Company had opened for business. It was very much a family
affair, as listed in the Helena City Directory for 1917: Lafayette
O. Waterbury was president, Ray was vice-president and Toilie (recalled from
the East by her father - 'It's time to come home,' he told her, 'I need you.')
was secretary-treasurer. Harry Ross Hubbard had also joined the fledgling
enterprise, but the only vacancy was in the lowly capacity of teamster.

On 2 January 1917 Ron was enrolled at the kindergarten
at Central School on Warren Street, just across from the new cathedral which,
with its twin spires and grey stone facade, towered reprovingly over the
city. Most days he was walked to school by his aunts, Marnie and June, who
were at Helena High, opposite Central School.

Ron, who was known to the neighbourhood kids as 'brick' because of his
hair, would later claim that while still at kindergarten he used the
'lumberjack fighting' he had learned from his grandfather to deal with a gang
of bullies who were terrorizing children on their way to and from the school.
But one of Ron's closest childhood friends, Andrew Richardson, has no
recollection of him protecting local children from bullies. 'He never
protected nobody,' said Richardson. 'It was all bullshit. Old Hubbard was the
greatest con artist who ever lived.'[5]

Although the war in Europe, with its unbelievable casualty toll, was
filling plenty of columns in the Independent, local news, as always,
received quite as much prominence as despatches from foreign
correspondents. Suffragettes figured prominently in many of the headlines and
after the women's suffrage amendment was narrowly approved in the Montana
legislature, the victorious women celebrated by electing one of their leaders,
Jeanette Rankin, to a seat in the US Congress. Women voters also helped push
through a bill to ban the sale of alcohol as the Prohibition lobby gained
ground across the nation.

Even the news, in February 1917, that Germany had declared its intention to
engage in unrestricted submarine warfare did not fully hit home until the
following month when it was learned that German

submarines had attacked and sunk three US merchant ships in the
Atlantic. On 6 April, the United States declared war on Germany; Congresswoman
Rankin was one of only a handful of dissenters voting against the war
resolution.

Mobilization began at once in Helena at Fort Harrison, headquarters of the
2nd Regiment, but the wave of patriotic fervour that swept the state brought
in its wake a sinister backlash in the form of witchhunts for 'traitors' and
'subversives'. In August, self-styled vigilantes in Butte dragged labour
leader Frank Little from his rooming house and hanged him from a railroad
trestle on the edge of town. His 'crime' was that he was leader of the
Industrial Workers of the World, a radical group viewed as seditious.

Although selective draft mustered more than seven thousand troops in
Montana by the beginning of August, Harry Hubbard felt, as an ex-serviceman,
that he should not wait to be drafted. He had served for four years in the US
Navy and his country needed trained seamen. Yes, he had family
responsibilities, but he was also an American. He knew his duty and May knew
she could not, and should not, stop him. On 10 October, Hub kissed her
goodbye, hugged his six-year-old son and left Helena for the Navy Recruiting
Station at Salt Lake City, Utah, to re-enlist for a four-year term in the US
Navy. Two weeks later, little Ron and his mother joined the crowds lining Last
Chance Gulch to watch Montana's 163rd Infantry march out of town on their way
to join the fighting in Europe. Ron thought they were just 'swell'.

After Hub had gone, May and Ron moved into 'the old brick' with the rest of
the family and May found a job as a clerk with the State Bureau of Child and
Animal Protection in the Capital Building. If little Ron experienced any sense
of loss from the absence of his father, it was certainly alleviated by the
intense warmth and sociability of the Waterbury family. He had grandparents
who considered he could do no wrong, a loving mother and an assorted array of
adoring aunts who liked nothing more than to spend time playing with him.

It was inevitable that he would be spoiled with all the attention, but he
was also a rewarding child, exceptionally imaginative and adventurous, always
filling his time with original ideas and games. 'He was very quick, always
coming up with ideas no one else had thought of,' said Marnie. 'He'd grab a
couple of beer bottles and use them as binoculars or he would write little
plays and draw the scenery and everything. Whatever he started he finished:
when he made up his mind he was going to do something, you could be sure he
would see it through.'

Hub wrote home frequently and made it clear that he
was enjoying being back in the service, the war notwithstanding. He had been
selected for training as an Assistant Paymaster and if he made the

grade, he proudly explained in a letter to May, it would mean that he would
become an officer. On 13 October 1918 Harry Ross Hubbard was honorably
discharged from enlisted service in the US Navy Reserve Force and the
following day he was appointed Assistant Paymaster with the rank of Ensign. He
was thirty-two years old, positively geriatric for an Ensign - but it was one
of the proudest moments of his life.

Eleven days later, the front pages of the Helena Independent was
dominated by a single word in letters three inches high: PEACE.
Underneath, the sub-heading declared, 'Cowardly Kaiser and Son Flee to
Holland.' The terms of surrender were to be so severe, the newspaper
innocently reported, that Germany would forever 'be absolutely deprived from
further military power of action on land and sea and in the air'.

Unlike most wives whose husbands had gone to war, May knew that the
Armistice did not mean that Hub would be coming home; he had already told her
that he intended to make a career in the Navy. It was a decision she could not
sensibly oppose, for she was obliged to admit that he had been incapable of
making progress in his varied civilian jobs and he was clearly happier in the
Navy. Furthermore, his position with the Capital City Coal Company was far
from secure, for she knew that her father was worried about the business -
they were having difficulty finding sufficient supplies of coal from Roundup
and a third coal company had opened up in town, increasing competition. The
Waterbury girls were helping with the company's cash flow problems by knocking
on doors round and about Fifth Avenue to collect payment for overdue bills.

Lafe Waterbury never allowed his business worries to cast a shadow over his
family life and for the children, Ron included, weeks and months passed with
not much to fret about other than whether or not the taffy [toffee] would
set. 'Taffy-pulls' were a regular ritual in the Waterbury household: a coat
hanger was kept permanently on the back of the door in the basement to loop
the sugar and water mix and stretch it repeatedly, filling the taffy with air
bubbles so that it would snap satisfactorily when it was set. Liberty Bill
would always sit and watch the proceedings with saliva dripping from his
jaws. Once he grabbed a mouthful when the taffy looped too close to the floor
and disappeared under a bush ill the garden for hours while he tried to suck
it out of his teeth.

One day Marnie and June were in the basement pulling taffy with Ron when
they heard their father laughing out loud in the front room. They ran upstairs
to see what was going on and found him standing at the window, both hands
clutched to his quivering midriff, tears streaming down his cheeks. Outside, a
young lady, in a tight hobble

skirt - the very latest fashion in Helena - was attempting to step down
from the wooden sidewalk to cross the road. To her acute embarrassment, she
was discovering that while it was feasible to totter along a level surface, it
was almost impossible to negotiate a step of more than a few inches without
hoisting her skirt to a level well beyond the bounds of decorum, or jumping
with both feet together. Eventually, shuffling to the edge of the sidewalk,
she managed to slide first one foot down, then, with a precarious swivel, the
other. By this time Lafe was forced to sit down, for he could no longer stand,
and the entire family had gathered at the window.

Laughter was an omnipresent feature of life in 'the old brick'. When Toilie
brought home a bottle of wine and gave her mother a glass, the unaccustomed
alcohol thickened her tongue and the more she struggled with ever more
recalcitrant syllables, the more her daughters howled. Then there was the time
when Lafe leaned back in his swivel chair, overbalanced, fell under a shelf
piled with magazines and hit his head as he tried to get up - no one would
ever forget that. On the other hand almost the worst incident any of the
children could remember was the day when their mother's pet canary escaped
through an open window into the snow and never returned. Ida had loved that
canary when she was lying in bed she would whistle and it would fly over,
perch on the covers and pick her teeth.

In the summer, the children spent every waking hour after school
outdoors. May, who had changed her job and now worked as a clerk in the State
Department of Agriculture and Publicity, bought a small plot of land in the
foothills of the mountains, about two hours' walk from the family home and
paid a local carpenter to put up a raw pine shack. It had just two rooms
inside, with a long covered porch at the front. They called it 'The Old
Homestead' and used it at weekends and holidays, taking enough food and drink
with them to last the duration, and drawing water from a well on a nearby
property. Most times Lafe would drive them out in the Model T. and drop them
on the Butte road at the closest point to the house, from where they walked
across the fields. The children loved The Old Homestead for the simple
pleasure of being in the mountains, playing endless games under a perfect blue
sky, optimistically panning for gold in tumbling streams of crystal clear
water, picking great bunches of wild flowers, cooking on a campfire and
huddling round an oil lamp at night, telling spooky stories.

When they were not planning a trip to The Old Homestead, Ron pestered his
aunts to take him on a hike up to the top of Mount Helena, where they would
sit with a picnic, munching sandwiches and silently staring out over the
sprawl of the city below and the ring of mountains beyond. One of the trails
up the mountain passed a smoky

cave said to be haunted by the men who had used it as a hideout while being
stalked by Indians in the mid-nineteenth century. Marnie used to take Ron,
squirming with thrilled terror, into the cave to look for ghosts.

Marnie and Ron, with only eight years between them, were as close as
brother and sister. When she was in a school play at Helena High, taking the
part of Marie Antoinette, he sat wide-eyed throughout the performance then ran
all the way home to tell his grandma how beautiful Marnie was.

While the children remained blithely unaware of
events outside the comforting confines of 'the old brick' and The Old
Homestead, few adults in Montana were able to enjoy such a blinkered
existence. After years of abundant crops and high wheat prices, postwar
depression brought about a collapse in the market - bushel prices halved in
the space of three months - and the summer of 1919 saw the first of a cycle of
disastrous droughts. Every day brought further ominous tidings of mortgage
foreclosures, banks closing, abandoned farms turned into dustbowls and
thousands of settlers leaving the state to seek a livelihood elsewhere.

In this gloomy economic climate, Lafe Waterbury was forced to close down
the Capital City Coal Company. For a while he tinkered with a small business
selling automobile spares and vulcanizing tyres, but the depression meant that
motorists were laying up their cars rather than repairing them and Lafe
decided to retire, thankful that he still had sufficient capital left to
support his family.

May helped with the household expenses, although she realized she and Ron
would not be able to stay there forever. Hub had been promoted to Lieutenant
(Junior Grade) in November 1919, and whenever he could, had been coming home
on leave to see his wife and son. He was still intent on a career in the Navy,
although he had already suffered some setbacks. He had been obliged to appear
before a court of inquiry in May, 1920, while serving as Supply Officer on the
USS Aroostock, to explain a deficiency in his accounts of $942.25. He
also had an unfortunate tendency to overlook personal debts. No less than
fourteen creditors in Kalispell claimed he left behind unpaid bills totalling
$125; Fred Fisch, high-grade clothier of Vallejo, California, was pursuing him
for $10 still owed on a uniform overcoat; and a Dr McPherson of San Diego was
owed $30. All of them complained to the Navy Department, casting a shadow over
Hubbard's record.[6] He had a long spell of inactive
duty at the beginning of 1921 while he was waiting for a new posting and he
and May spent a great deal of time discussing their future. Hub expected May
to conform, like other Navy wives, and trail around the country with him from
posting to posting; when he was at sea, he wanted her to be close to his
ship's

home port. May obviously wanted to be with Hub, but she was reluctant to
move Ron from school to school and loath to leave her family. She had perhaps
secretly hoped that Hub would tire of the Navy and return to civilian life in
Helena, but the depression wiped out whatever miserable opportunities he might
have had of finding work and she realized it would never happen. In September
1921, Hub was posted to the battleship USS Oklahoma as an Assistant
Supply Officer. He anticipated serving on board for at least two years, much
of that time at sea, and the opportunities for visits home to Helena would be
severely curtailed. As a loyal wife, May felt she could no longer justify
staying in Helena. She and Ron packed their bags, bade the family a tearful
farewell and caught a train for San Diego, the USS Oklahoma's home
port.

Although Ron must have missed the convivial domesticity of 'the old brick',
he did not appear to mind, in the least, being a 'Navy brat' - the curiously
affectionate label applied to all children of servicemen, many of whom needed
more than the fingers of both hands to count their schools. He was a
gregarious boy, quick to make friends, and starting a new school held no
terrors for him. After about a year in San Diego, the Hubbards moved north to
Seattle, in Washington State, when the Oklahoma was transferred to
Puget Sound Navy Shipyard.

In Seattle Ron joined the boy scouts, an event that would figure
prominently in a hand-written journal which he scrawled on the pages of an old
accounts book, interspersed with short stories, a few years later: 'The year
Nineteen Hundred and Twenty-Three rallied round and found me contentedly
resting on my laurels, a first class badge. For I was a boy scout then and
deaf was my friend that hadn't heard all about it. I considered Seattle the
best town on the map as far as scouting was concerned.'

In October 1923, Lieutenant Hubbard completed sea duty on the USS
Oklahoma and, after brief spells of temporary duty in San Francisco and
New York, was assigned for further training to the Bureau of Supply and
Accounts School of Application in Washington DC. The US Navy, which clearly
despised any form of land transport, saved itself the cost of two
long-distance train fares by giving May and Ron berths on the USS
U.S. Grant, a German warship acquired by the US Navy after the First World
War, which was due to sail from Seattle to Hampton Roads, Virginia, via the
Panama Canal. It was thus December, and the snow was thick on the ground,
before the Hubbards were re-united in Washington after a voyage of some seven
thousand miles, three-quarters of the way round the coast of the United
States. It was on this trip, it seems, that Ron met the enigmatic Commander
'Snake' Thompson of the US Navy Medical Corps, a psychoanalyst he

would later claim was responsible for awakening his youthful interest in
Freud, although he only made the briefest mention of the journey in his
journal. His style of writing was fluent, breezy, schoolboyishly cocksure and
addressed directly to the reader. 'If obviously pushed upon,' he wrote, 'I
supposed I could write a couple of thousands [sic] words on that trip
. . . But I spare you.'

He usually referred to himself in a gently ironic tone, perhaps to avoid
giving an impression of thinking rather too highly of himself. When he
arrived in Washington, two troops of local scouts were battling for a prized
scouting trophy, the Washington Post Cup. Troop 100, he noted, belonged to the
YMCA 'and would therefore probably lose', so he joined the other outfit, Troop
10, 'which must have sighed loudly when it perceived me crossing the
threshold'.

The journal also contained flashes of humour, delivered deadpan: 'Visualize
me in a natty scout suit, my red hair tumbling out from under my hat, doing my
good turn daily. Once I saved a man's life. I could have pushed him under a
streetcar but I didn't.'

Intent on pushing Troop 10 to victory, Ron began acquiring merit badges
with extraordinary speed and dedication. In his first two weeks, he was
awarded badges for Firemanship and Personal Health, quickly followed by
Photography, Life-Saving, Physical Development and Bird Study. He determinedly
thrust his way into the front rank of the Washington scouts (it was absolutely
not his nature to languish shyly among the pack) and he was chosen to
represent them on a delegation to the White House to ask President Calvin
Coolidge to accept the honorary chairmanship of National Boys' Week. He noted
the invitation in his journal with characteristic cheek: 'One fine day the
Scout executive telephoned my house and told me I was to meet the president
that afternoon. I told him I thought it pretty swell of the president to come
way out to my house . . .'

Brushed and scrubbed ('even the backs of my hands were thoroughly washed')
he waited with forty other boys outside the Oval Office until a secretary
emerged and said the president was ready to receive them. ' With fear and
trembling, we entered and repeated our names a few times as we pumped Cal's
listless hand . . . I think I have the distinction of being the only
boy scout in America who has made the President wince.' The great man spoke in
such lugubrious tones that Ron compared the occasion to being invited to his
own hanging.

In the boy scout diary he kept intermittently around this time, Ron was a
lot less forthcoming than in the journal, which was clearly written with an
intention to entertain. The most frequent entry in his diary was a laconic
'Was bored.' Yet he would claim in later years that the four months he spent
in Washington was a crucial period of his life during which he received 'an
extensive education in the field of the

human mind' under the tutelage of his friend Commander
Thompson.[7] He also noted - in his journal - that
he became a close friend of President Coolidge's son, Calvin Junior, whose
early death accelerated his 'precocious interest in the mind and spirit of
Man.'[8]

Although Miller implies there was no such person as 'Snake' Thompson, he did
in fact exist. William Sims Bainbridge, the eminent sociologist and author of
several papers on Scientology, reports this vignette of the man:
"Snake Thompson was the best friend of my great
uncle, Con (Consuelo Seoane). Together, around 1911, they spent nearly two
years as American spies inside the Japanese Empire, charting possible invasion
routes and counting all the Japanese fortifications and naval guns. It was an
official but top secret joint Army-Navy spy expedition, with Con representing
the Army, and Snake, the Navy. They pretended to be South African naturalists
studying Japanese reptiles and amphibians, and Con was constantly worried that
Snake had a camera hidden in his creel, which would get them shot if the
Japanese checked too closely. Thompson habitually wore a green scarf fastened
with a gold pin in the shape of a snake." (private email, quoted by Rob Clark,
in article <336000c9.122495268@news.mindspring.com> posted to
alt.religion.scientology on 25 Apr 1997) -- Dean Benjamin

'Snake' Thompson was apparently a friend of Ron's father and a personal
student of Sigmund Freud, under whom he had studied in Vienna. His
inauspicious nickname was derived from his love of slithery creatures, but it
was in his capacity as a student of the founder of psychoanalysis that he took
it upon himself to give the twelve-year-old boy a grounding in Freudian theory
as well as 'shoving his nose' into books at the Library of Congress.

[Ron would often refer to Thompson in later life, yet the Commander remains
an enigma. He cannot be identified from US Navy records, nor can his
relationship with Freud be established. Doctor Kurt Eissler, one of the
world's leading authorities on Freud, says he has no knowledge of any
correspondence or contact of any kind between Freud and
Thompson.[9]]

Presumably the hours that Ron and Thompson spent closeted together in the
Library of Congress were somehow dovetailed into the time he devoted to
scouting, for on 28 March 1924, a few days after his thirteenth birthday, Ron
was made an eagle scout.

'Twenty-one merit badges in ninety days,' he recorded triumphantly in his
journal. 'I was quite a boy then. Written up in the papers and all that. Take
a look at me. You didn't know the wreck in front of you was once the youngest
Eagle Scout in the country, did you?'

Neither did Ron. At that time the Boy Scouts of America only kept an
alphabetical record of eagle scouts, with no reference to their
ages.[10]